Radiotherapy expert Varian Medical Systems tells us it has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. FDA for a radiotherapy treatment planning tool designed to enhance quality, consistency, and efficiency in radiotherapy treatment planning.

Background

Showcased for the first time at the annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) in Atlanta last month, RapidPlan opens the door to enhanced treatment planning by providing clinics with knowledge-based models that generate high-quality personalized treatment plans for their patients.

While RapidPlan has been cleared by the FDA for distribution in U.S., it is not yet available in other parts of the world.

Company comments

“RapidPlan streamlines the planning process by enabling users to tap into knowledge derived from historical treatment plans,” says Corey Zankowski, vice president of product management. “It considers the unique characteristics of the current patient and helps to generate a new treatment plan that approaches the optimal in terms of achieving the radiation oncologist’s tumor coverage and normal tissue sparing goals.”

“Without this tool, treatment planning is an iterative process requiring several rounds of trial-and-error revisions,” says Chris Toth, vice president of marketing. “RapidPlan is designed to help users produce a near-ideal plan the first time, reducing or even eliminating the need for multiple time consuming iterations.”

RapidPlan is also a “learning system,” Zankowski says. “A group of clinicians can take their best treatment plans and add them to the system for use in creating new, improved practice models for the future. The models can be shared among colleagues within a care network to create a practice standard.”

“As a physician, I’m particularly excited about how we can ‘train’ the RapidPlan tool by using information from our best plans as a starting point when planning for new patients,” says Dee Khuntia, Varian’s vice president for medical affairs. “The system will also enable benchmarking by allowing us to compare our treatment plans to models created by communities of experts from around the globe. RapidPlan was designed to allow for creation of high quality, world class treatment plans anywhere. Additionally, this can be done in a fraction of the time required for standard treatment planning, which is particularly important as we continue to become more efficient in our practices.”